Startling statement from the world’s most famous evangelist.
Mr. Graham is not an authority on science, but he is open-minded enough to leave the door open to God creating humankind by evolution:
I think we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times, and we’ve tried to make the Scriptures say things that they weren’t meant to say, and I think we have made a mistake thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of redemption, and of course, I accept the Creation story. I believe that God did create the universe. I believe he created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point he took this person or being and made him a living soul or does not change the fact that God created man … Whichever way God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man’s relationship to God (emphasis original, quoted in Lamoureux p. 112, originally printed in Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man, 1997, p. 72-74).
He emphatically states that the Bible is not a book of science, but a book of redemption. God endowed humankind with a soul either gradually or not, but he is a living soul that can relate to God.
That is not something one hears in Sunday school or church, every Sunday.
That took courage, and I admire him for it.
How does this post help me grow in my knowledge of God?
I like to keep an open mind about the first eleven chapters of Genesis. It is clear that the biblical authors had a scientifically limited point of view because they lived in their own times. God inspired them, true, but they were not androids; they wrote from what they knew. It is unfair to impose on them a ton of demands when their knowledge could carry only fifty pounds.
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